Thursday, March 28, 2013

German Atheist Company Claims Discrimination By US Postal Service Workers

A German company, Atheist Shoes, claims that the U.S. Postal Service is delaying and losing its deliveries because of the company's beliefs. The small company, which designs and produces shoes, was created by a group of atheists. Here is a portion of the company's full account (apparently posted earlier this week) of its experiences in shipping its shoes to customers in the United States:

We have lots of customers in the USA, but sometimes the shoes we send them take longer than they should to arrive, or even go missing. and, when some of our customers asked us not to use Atheist-branded packing tape on their shipments, we started to wonder if the delays were caused by the US Postal Service taking offence at our overt godlessness.

So, we launched an experiment. We sent 178 packages to 89 people, in 49 US states. Each person was sent 2 packages; one sealed with Atheist-branded packing tape, the other with a neutral tape.

They all left Berlin on November 21st, 2012, and, in theory, the branded and unbranded packages should have traveled at exactly the same speed. Atheist-branded packages took on average 3 days longer to reach their destinations. 9 Atheist packages went missing, and just 1 non-branded....

Having run a series of control tests in Germany and Europe, which demonstrate no such bias, the problem appears to lie in the USA and is likely explained by the differential handling of packages by the employees of the US Postal Service....

We're no longer using Atheist-packing tape on our shipments to the USA and delivery times are already improving....